Seize the Fire (16 page)

If only it had not been Sir Sheridan. If only, when she'd chosen to mortify herself, she'd done it before anyone but him.

Poison.

And to think he'd cared for the cause of freedom so much that he'd even offered to marry her, had gallantly pretended that he had some admiration for her so as not to wound her feelings.

But she'd forfeited even chivalrous politeness now. She'd made a disaster of things. He was angry at her, and spoke the truth. She was a miserable failure, a pathetic parody of what she'd hoped to be, unable to accomplish even the first step toward a worthy goal without making a complete bungle of it.
Poison, poison, purest poison.

She lifted her head miserably. Outlined in a rosy glow, her shadow lay in a long ripple across the simple bed and up the whitewashed wall.

Another—taller, broader—lay superimposed upon it.

She looked over her shoulder, bit her lip and scrambled to her feet.

"Don't mind me," Sir Sheridan said. He leaned against the doorframe. "And as long as you're praying, put in a word on my behalf, will you? Sheridan Drake—Knight of the Bath, thirty-first on the captains' list, disobliging bastard and general all-around heartless dog. You may have to jostle the Old Man's memory pretty hard." She stood staring at him through a blur. "Don't cry," he said.

She bent her head, ashamed of the weakness, unable to stop.

He came forward, silent on bare feet. "Damn it." He pulled her into his arms, against his chest, his fingers closing with casual cruelty in her hair. "Must you turn me into a mindless clown?"

Her scalp burned under the grip that tilted her face up to his. His kiss hurt; she could taste the anger in it, but the hot need welled up the instant he touched her. He drew one hand down through her hair, pausing in the small of her back, spreading his palm until his fingertips curved around her waist. He held her that way, the peaks of her breasts pressed into his bare chest through silk and crushed lace, their shape swollen and spread against him. It made no difference what she was, or who, or why he came—it all whirled away and left only awareness: his body a bruising pressure against hers, his hand locked in her hair and the taste of him consuming her.

Sheridan explored her, softness everywhere, her breasts and velvet skin surrendering and shaping to his mouth and fingers. It was that lush promise, that sweet unconscious yielding, that drove him past the last scrap of sanity and lit the short fuse to annihilation. He was past fighting himself or her. It was all madness, all weakness and stupidity—it would get him killed, and he didn't care.

Olympia spread her hands across his bare skin. His back was taut; hard and smooth, no physical trace of the faint scars across the broad muscled expanse beneath her fingers. But she remembered. The heat and desperate longing to cherish and hold him spread to her body—she burned where she touched him; she burned all through, a hot ache that coursed from the fierce possession of her mouth down to her breasts and belly and legs—a pleasure that bloomed between her thighs and made her move and press and mold to him as if she could make him part of herself.

"Enough…" he mumbled, a harsh breath against her lips. "That's enough. God, this is suicide; it's got to stop."

But he held her still; he didn't stop. He kissed her throat, pushing back her hair, coiling it around his fist. She opened her mouth and allowed her own tongue to taste the hot, bare skin at the curve of his shoulder.

She felt him groan. His powerful muscles moved, salty skin sliding past her tongue as he pushed her back on the bed. He hung above her on braced arms, cursing softly even as he grasped her shoulders and bent to kiss the base of her throat, to nurse and nuzzle while his body forced hers down into the unyielding bed.

She felt his hands at her waist, pulling the dressing gown upward, tugging the fabric with rough and frantic moves. Soft air caressed her bared calves, her thighs and then her hips. He spread his palm across the round curve of her belly and made a sound of excitement, a rough note deep in his chest. His forearm drove her shoulder back against the coarse weave of the sheets as he bowed to reach her breast.

He kissed it through the silk, his tongue finding the tip, drawing it against his teeth until she arched and whimpered with the searing swell of pleasure.

Sheridan lost himself in her body, tasting the delicious heat, sliding his hand into the silky crevice between her legs. He wanted her passionate, he wanted her arching that voluptuous figure upward, begging for what he burned to give. He caressed the plump downy mound at the apex of her thigh and slipped two fingers into her alluring feminine recess, his tongue and lips closing on the peak of her breast.

She was moist and hot, insanely inviting. He drowned in her, in the virginal tightness of her, in the way she closed her legs convulsively on his invading hand. His fingers slid, pushing, exploring deeper and deeper until she began to gasp and tremble beneath him.

He tugged at her nipple, curling his fist in the satin cascade of her hair to hold her head down as she tried to lift it with a moan. His fingers met the unbroken barrier inside her. Heat flashed through him, the fierce desire to ram and force, to crush her, spread her, take her delicious softness in absolute possession.

He started to withdraw, to reach for his breeches and free the aching pressure there, but her body followed the move. Her hips curved upward. She tossed her head, pushing into his hand while her fingers raked his back. With the awkward desperation of inexperience she clutched at him, holding his head to her breast. She arched with a strangled moan—that long, lovely strain of female ecstasy—and then her body was shuddering against him in a way that made him want to explode with response.

But he didn't. From somewhere amid her collapse into panting oblivion he found a vestige of reality. He shoved her away from him, sitting up supported on a shaking arm. He looked around·

The door to the terrace was wide open, the last of sunset still poured through, the sound of polite conversation still drifted up from the garden below.

"God Almighty," he said, and thrust himself off the bed. His body throbbed with frustrated violence; he didn't dare look at her—he knew what he would see revealed in naked and tempting disarray. Fatal—fatal to see her, fatal to stay here—he had to get hold of himself. He put a shaky hand over his eyes and muttered, "You bloody born fool, you braying ass—got your dashed brains between your legs…Lord—what am I doing?"

"Sir Sheridan?" Her voice was a breathless whisper behind him.

He braced against the door without turning. "Go to bed," he snapped. "Don't follow me, or I'll kill you."

Striding out onto the empty terrace, he swung into his own room, pulled the door closed and shot the bolt. He grabbed the bellpull, yanked it twice, and then again for good measure. Then he paced, prowling the sparsely furnished room, picking up an empty vase, putting it down again, dousing his face in lukewarm water from the basin, kicking the Portuguese rug back into place—moving, and moving again.

He could not do it. There was no conceivable way he could continue. Damn her and her bloody tears, her face; curse her bloody charming plump buttocks that made him get up from a safe bed and go trailing after her like some puling adolescent half-wit. He rested his elbows against the wall and locked his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling while his body raged.

Mustafa answered his ring, sleepy and grumbling.

"I want the maid," Sheridan said shortly. "Lily. Lavinia. What the devil's her name?"

"Mary." Mustafa yawned and bowed. "It is done, my pasha." He shuffled away.

Sheridan sat down on the bed. He shifted, tugging at his breeches, a futile effort to ease the stiff discomfort inside them. He thought of Olympia, wondered if she'd gotten into bed, had a flashing picture of her lying there with her legs spread invitingly and her gown around her waist. He dropped his forehead into his hands and groaned.

There was a quiet knock at the door from the inside corridor. The maid he'd hired for Olympia slipped into his room. Sheridan looked up hopefully. She was skinny, but he was desperate. He stood up and gripped her arm.

She came willingly, no blasted tears, no naively trembling lips, no figure whatsoever—all bones, and a strong sample of Madeira's famous wine on her breath. Sheridan turned his face and put his hands on her shoulders, feeling the sharp jut of her collarbone beneath his fingers.

He couldn't help it; he thought of Olympia's smooth white bosom, her beautiful round breasts. As the maid melted against him, he took a step back, glancing down at her face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth slack, and he had a terrible vision of a crow: black hair and thin gaping beak.

After that it was hopeless. He tried. He grasped her breast and her buttock, what there was of them, but all he felt was revolted and hot and ready to kill something with his bare hands. He pushed her off and said, "Never mind."

She stumbled back. For an instant she stared at him blankly. Then chagrin and surly resentment sharpened her thin face even further. "Never mind? I've had a hard day's work; I leave me dinner to come up here at your beck and call, and it's 'never mind,' is it?"

"Yes." He sat down in the single chair and gave her a cold stare. "Tell Mustafa you're to have something for your trouble."

"You're a bleedin' queer bastard, ain't you? I been lookin' forward to it, being bulled by a great handsome jack like you; I been waiting a bleedin' fortnight for you to get the itch, and now here you are lookin' like you got a bleedin' bread loaf in your pants, telling me never mi—"

She broke off, scampering back as he threw himself out of the chair and made a nasty swipe at her. He missed her by a mile, but his fist connected with the empty vase on the bedstand and exploded it where it sat with a smash of splintering glass.

The maid ducked and fled.

Sheridan threw himself facedown on the bed. He had to get away; his carefully planned options were disintegrating in his hands. If he played along with Palmerston and married his princess, he was a marked man. If he delivered her as a royal bride to Claude Nicolas—deflowered, possibly even pregnant, by a common sea captain—he could count his days on one finger. And if he stayed to shepherd her along, stayed to see that delectable body every day, stayed to feel her light touch on his arm as he escorted her to a chair—and worst, worst of all: stayed to endure the knowledge of what she became in his arms—if he stayed and could not have her, he'd go utterly mad.

He had to get shut of her. Somehow.

Olympia had a difficult time keeping her mind on her purpose. Indeed, she had to admit guiltily that in the past two weeks on Madeira she'd almost forgotten it, going about in this daydream that seemed to have more in common with reckless intoxication than happiness. When Mr. Stothard came out into the garden to inform her that Sir Sheridan had finally returned with their palanquin and wished to leave for their dinner engagement immediately, she rose from her reverie with pink cheeks and a shamed start.

She'd been thinking of him and that amazing thing he'd done to her…that intimate touch that had ended in a physical explosion like nothing she'd imagined in her life.

Thank God, he had not touched her like that again. She didn't know what she would have done if he had. But his subsequent conduct—his unerring solicitude, his special thoughtfulness, the covert smiles when no one else was watching: improbably, everything indicated that he'd formed an honorable lover's attachment to her. Those other feelings…they were
her
flaw, and not a very pretty one, considering that instead of treasuring the polite public proofs of his admiration and regard, in the depth of the night she relived those passionate moments in her bed over and over, imagining his hand on her body, the drift of his dark lashes downward over her skin.

While she'd been idly dreaming of such disgraceful pleasures, Sir Sheridan had been busy all afternoon with business, with
her
business, taking her jewels to the proper people to have them appraised and to determine what should be sold to finance the remainder of their journey.

He was late returning. Normally that would have made little difference in the informal Madeiran society. But tonight was different. Tonight the two of them were invited to dine out aboard H.M.S.
Terrier,
at anchor in Funchal's harbor, as special guests of Captain Francis Fitzhugh.

Her heart quickened when she saw Sir Sheridan out in the tiny street, waiting with his foot propped up on one of the wooden runners of the palanquin while their host fussed about settling her with a shawl. Sir Sheridan shook hands and swung up onto the seat beside her. The Portuguese attendants adjusted the rope brake and gave the palanquin a shove. The sled runners began their strange grating passage downward on the cobblestoned street that was too steep and narrow for any carriage to negotiate.

"Here—" Sir Sheridan reached beneath his coat and after a moment's search brought out one of her jewels, a sapphire pendant tinged with a rare heliotrope color and surrounded by diamonds. "This will flatter that gown, don't you think?"

Olympia, who had never cared a thing for what jewel would flatter what, found herself blushing with pleasure and self-consciousness as he fastened the clasp around her neck. He touched the stone, his fingers brushing the skin just above her neckline as he turned the pendant and laid it flat.

"Thank you," she said, and bent her head to cover the blaze of her feelings.

For her to be in love, body and soul, with Sheridan Drake was the most natural thing possible.
Not
to be in love with him would have been absurd. But she'd always assumed her devotion would be unrequited, a silent adoration from afar, as befitted a hero and a pudgy, plain girl with unkempt eyebrows.

But for him to want her, to be attracted to her, to actually return her love…

She didn't believe it. At first she really had thought it a form of mockery, those moments when he'd kissed her and called her beautiful—for no reason, for no logical motive she could fathom, except that he meant it. He'd said he meant it. He wouldn't lie. He'd held her while she cried, and no one had ever done that before.